I'll try to speak for those of us who aren't naive hippies but who think the OWS folks actually did some good by shifting national discussion from austerity to more stimulus for the middle class:

Those good natured white kids @ OWS shouldn't be mocked because they feel exploited by the lumpenproles trying to leach free food off of them. The very definition of lumpenprole (it's not really a class thing) is people that make coordination harder, and coordination failure more likely. OWS was a virtuous coordination success for all its idiosyncracies.

Fuck the lumpenproles, and kudos to those kids who blew up austerity talk that was pumped up by idiots of the Right and the Left in DC.

I'm a long way from New York, so any New Yorkers reading, please help me out here. Are the NYPD, frustrated with do-nothing Nanny Bloomberg and the pusillanimous private owners of Zuccotti Park, encouraging the "homeless" and other nuisances to head on over to the OWS protest for some free eats and smokes and whatever? That's what I'd do in their place. Is it happening?

I'm impressed the NY Times even brought it up, simply because it hightlights the division between the Susan Sarandon/Michael Moore limo lib side and the, you know, actual lower depths.

You called it in an earlier post I think - the party's going to end when the actual destitute come crashing in, hoping to get some gourmet protest food and maybe some weed and hang out with the fun times.

And I'm pretty sure the young rebels aren't going to remember it like that. It's going to be the man coming down on them or some such thing.

To be fair, I'm no fan of Wall Street either. They have plenty to be angry about (I'm looking at you AIG). That said, the grandstanding is annoying. Being a white person with dreadlocks isn't going to reform anything.

"Kudos" to Prof. Krugman above for castigating the "lumpenproles" as they will only distract from the carefully crafted media image of Fed-Up Citizens [college grads lacking marketable skills, plus union functionaries] protesting The 1% Plutocracy [by malingering and interviewing w/ bored journalists all day, rather than doing anything so gauche as supporting a political candidate]. Remember Jon Stewart's Rally to Celebrate Ourselves? The "effect" of that on the American voter was quite salutary, insofar as it had one

No, these clowns will do nothing. The LAT had an article on the LA Occupy folks, all they do all day is argue with themselves, they require 100% unanimity to do anything. They vote with "twinkle" fingers, the human bullhorn (repeating stuff), filled with Marxists, Communists, drug addicts, Open Borders fanatics, etc.

Among their demands is that the US abolish borders and nationality, anyone can move here and vote, any time. Its a ginned up Soros/Tides-ACORN led movement to produce street violence so Obama can in Plan C get five Supreme Court Justice votes for ruling by fiat. A Fujimori, Daniel Ortega play. Its worked for Ortega. His Constitution forbad another run at the Presidency, he over-rode it by a few Supreme Court justices.

@ Whiskey - "Among their demands is that the US abolish borders and nationality, anyone can move here and vote, any time."

No, Whiskey. There are no demands apart from the one, big implicit one which, if you don't get it, there's not point in elucidating. That's the beauty of this movement. These people don't claim to be political scientists. They don't agree on anything but the problem -- and, like Garrison, THEY WILL BE HEARD!

Keep it up OWS. When the temperatures fall, move inside. There are plenty of public spaces to be occupied. And private ones two, including the entrances and exits of buildings in which the big trading floors are located. Plus jails are warm places too after all.

John McWhorter suggested they won't be successful because they can't "threaten the vote."

Can't threaten the vote? Here's how to threaten the vote: run a third-party candidate. Remember what Perot did to the Republicans in 1992? Ralph Nader to the Dems in 2000?

Somebody like Sen Bernie Sanders of Vermont has real OWS cred. For a campaign speech all he has to do is repeat the speech he made on the Senate floor a couple of years ago. Then extract written promises from Obama (here's where the political economists come in) on issues like immigration, trade, financial regulation, wages-and-hours, tax reform and enforcement, etc as a condition for withdrawing from the race.

Some people might call that blackmail. I'd call it good politics.

Or if all else fails, take it up a notch. How about Occupy Manhattan? Manhattan is the most vulnerable city on earth for this kind of non-violent civil disobedience. Hell, you can barely get into and out of the city even on a good day. The Lincoln Tunnel, George Washington Bridge, Triborough Bridge, the main subway and train stations, these are the choke points. Imagine flash mobs descending on these places and chaining themselves together in giant meshes of protest.

Are the NYPD, frustrated with do-nothing Nanny Bloomberg and the pusillanimous private owners of Zuccotti Park, encouraging the "homeless" and other nuisances to head on over to the OWS protest for some free eats and smokes and whatever?

That's exactly what's going on.

cops in New York City are re-routing aggressive, drunken individuals picked up in parks across the city down to the protest site, taking advantage of the open-source nature of the protests.http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/10/31/nyc-law-enforcement-moving-aggressive-park-dwellers-into-occupy-wall-street-site/

"I'm a long way from New York, so any New Yorkers reading, please help me out here. Are the NYPD, frustrated with do-nothing Nanny Bloomberg and the pusillanimous private owners of Zuccotti Park, encouraging the "homeless" and other nuisances to head on over to the OWS protest for some free eats and smokes and whatever? That's what I'd do in their place. Is it happening?"

Because you want to squelch any attempt to call attention to the corrupt elites destroying America?

According to an article posted on Drudge, free clinics in Manhattan have been doing boffo business in the area of STD testing. More than embracing has been going on. And so the Summer of Love turns into the Autumn of Penicillin

I think the OWS people are a huge and terrifying problem for Obama, because they represent the subset of people on the left (more or less) who no lnger believe they can get the kind of change they want by voting for people like Obama. (And they're right--Goldman and Lockheed and Citi and Haliburton will always outbid the rest of the voters, Fox and CNN and MSNBC will always have a louder megaphone with which to make their concerns heard, etc.).

Obama won in 2008 over Hillary (the Democrat was going to win the election, after eight years of W and a financial meltdown in progress) by getting a lot of those same people excited to get involved in politics--Obama's campaign drew heavily from that class of people as small donors and local volunteers. Going to the OWS protests seems to me like a strong signal that you can see that didn't have the desired effect last time, and so you're looking for something else to do. My guess is that many of those people won't be volunteering or sending money to Obama this time around.

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